Development and implementation of Concept-Test questions in abstract algebra

Abstract

In tertiary mathematics courses, students often have difficulties acquiring an understanding of the mathematical concepts covered. One approach to address this problem is to implement so-called Concept-Tests. These are multiple-choice questions whose distractors represent common problems and misconceptions related to the concepts. While there exist lots of such questions for calculus, Concept-Test questions focusing on basic concepts of abstract algebra are still rare, although previous research has shown that students have many problems with these. We therefore developed such questions for important concepts of basic group and ring theory in the years 2020–2022. In this paper, we first want to present the questions and the developmental process. Furthermore, we want to present an empirical study investigating to what extent the questions helped students in a proof-oriented abstract algebra course to acquire an understanding of the concepts covered. This study especially indicates that the developed Concept-Test questions provided good starting points for conceptual changes.